Confluence Of Ignorance: Insights Instilled By Adversity From Other
by Quillon42
Summary: Ponders what might have happened just after the confrontation at the end of Flannery O'Connor's short story "Everything That Rises Must Converge"; more specifically, reflections from the main characters as to what could be learned from the incident each experienced.


CONFLUENCE OF IGNORANCE: INSIGHTS INSTILLED BY ADVERSITY FROM THE OTHER

By Quillon42

Lonely and forlorn were the sterile byways upon which the evening passengers had pursued their routine coursings throughout the town. Patrons of the regular local autobus circuit drabbled on and off the great steely chassis at their ordinary, near predictable intervals as they progressed to and from so many dismal destinations in their own sleepy town. Among so many mundane constants at play in this most quotidian of dramas, the only variable most vivid was the shade of skin shown upon the seated bus customer in question, and for most sensible people upon this common carrier, this matter did not present the same issue that it might have so many generations preceding.

Quite strongly the magnitude of one's melanin was mostly upon the minds of a mother and her boy who had frequented this bus line of late, however. For the former, a distancing from the darker other had been paramount, verily necessary as far as she had been concerned, so that the pride of her whiteness could subsist unsullied. On the other end of this spectrum was the woman's son, who had almost fetishized the tone of skin that was swarthier than his own.

Partly out of desire to connect with these people from whom he was restricted, and partially through an impulse to spite his matriarch Mrs. Chestny who made those parameters, Julian endeavored to engage with as many black men and women as the young man was able. Whimsies whirled around through his mind of starting societies so intellectual with such individuals. Fantasies pervaded as well of introducing one of the same to his family as his fiancée someday.

Throughout the majority of the ensuing hours upon that colossal conveyance cruising on downtown after dusk, the alabaster and the atramentous sat apart, as so had been the custom around this place and time. Julian for his own part had effected all he could to bridge the gap between the two human hues, but those unlike his milky ilk wanted nothing to do with him anyway despite all his efforts.

Matters came to an abrupt and hostile head when a woman of sepia skin alighted upon the bus with a son of her own in tow, not at all unlike the couplet of the YMCA-Bound white lady Mrs. Chestny and her bastardly baby boy. Unlike Julian, though, the other child was far younger and not versed in the looming cultural chasm yawning between constituents of races raring to fight one another to the end.

Regarding these recent alighting riders, Julian was focused upon the mean-looking matron, who chastised her charge Carver most cruelly as he struggled to settle into his seat. What caught the young white observer's eye more than aught was a hat the tints of pine and plum and a peculiar style besides which matched that of the same chapeau his own mother was sporting that same moment. How ironic it was, mused this would-be-author yet typing-machine-hawker in fact, that a madam at the opposite pole from his socially-oblivious, plantation-nostalgic mama would wear the same threads upon her head so as to nearly convert the two women from diametrically positioned to doppelgangers predestined.

Julian's mother, for her part, was much more invested in the child Carver so as to be unaware of the article of apparel associating her with the boy's pugilistic parent. Taking it upon herself to assume the ever so onerous atlas-load of noblesse oblige that she perennially shouldered, the woman sought only a nominal nickel, a denomination so diminutive yet something she had hoped might assist to perhaps purchase her a favorable seat in the hereafter. As both pairs of people prepared to debark from the bus, Mrs. Chestny found she could conjure only a penny to bear for the betterment of the boy.

Effusively now the well-meaning yet civilly-misguided moms of Julian approached Carver, she trying to get the child to cop to the copper now. Seeing the same and becoming somewhat more than nonplussed, the other, surlier siren of the night shouted and struck Mrs. Chestny without hesitation. Instants following and the jaunty Julian, who endeavored all he could (out of embarrassment) to keep his mother from giving the penny over, went immediately from aloof to alarmed upon realizing that his burden most maternal was regressing from one word responses to all out seizures for communication after the attack inflicted upon her.

Coming to this juncture thence, the reader in the canonical telling is presumed to infer that the marshmallow of a mother, with her skin more wan than ever from the aforementioned assault, was tending towards death, and her son possibly arcing towards orphanhood, with neither prepared for such untoward fates in fact. Yet in this rendition the rue-wracked features of the corpulent female on the city's floor had clenched once again, the vibrant eyes wiping open anew, warmth returning to her skin as she said to her son:

"Home…Julian, please…take me home."

With a most dutiful of "Yes, mother"s, an ingrate turned gracious from the near death experience of his most loving and supportive family member had obeyed ebulliently. So through this ordeal most appalling did Julian learn not to take for granted those who had helped him through his life, as Mrs. Chestny had paid his way through college and bolstered him on infinite other occasions as well. In turn, said sister who once savored slavery and all the wealth it brought her family had realized that those peoples oppressed under such an evil institution were not to be belittled or trifled with otherwise. Such an unpleasant learning experience this was for the woman and her son, but they took it to heart and decided for the time being to focus upon family for now, to renew love from one to the other presently; this was not out of some exclusive sentiment against anyone else; rather, merely a need to shift their perspectives on the world.

Yet it was very poignantly the case as well here, though, that through looking back on the scene with horror and understanding the consequences of her attack on Mrs. Chestny, the other mother, she of the brother on the bus, had been given a salient lesson from the school of life: that violence can leave other slain and does not serve as a solution, and that, rather, people of any background should be accorded patience and grace in place of aggression.

Indeed, so it was here that, ever ungraspable that it could be to the present society of Cancel Culture and Social Justice and Political Correctness today in which all nonwhite, nonmale, non-Christian populations enjoy in perpetuity an indisputable assignment of infinite rectitude and moral high ground; and conversely white individuals are condemned to live on as respirating, ambulatory punchlines of immorality and unintelligence for the remainder of all homo sapiens' tenure upon this terrain; and men are always automatically assholily incorrect and women are invariably superior in every kind of manner imaginable; and Jesus Christ can be caricatured out into the cosmos by content creators as a "Buddy" in films and memes galore, and have representations of his person be spit upon by Kevin Spacey (in the show _House Of Cards_) and pissed upon by Larry David (in the show _Curb Your Enthusiasm_), yet Mohammed, just for example, remains a visual Voldemort who cannot even be depicted at all whatsoever, much less derisively, under pain of death and war and political posturing; after all of those ever so righteous cultural transactions…the mind-massacring, brain-kablooeying, unforgiveable offensiveness rises to emerge ever so obscenely in the forefront of the reader's mind herein…that someone who was not of such hegemonic descriptors such as "white" and "male" could possibly actually be just as much in the wrong as well, and could stand to learn something from a given life-altering sort of experience. Verily, the inconceivableness and unacceptability of such a concept such as that forwarded through the above events could almost transfer the genre designation for this narrative from Americana most vanilla (and chocolate) to that of the most far-flung of science fucking fiction.


End file.
